Researchers, led by UO archaeologist, find pre-Clovis human DNA

"If our DNA evidence and radiocarbon dating hold up on additional coprolites that are now undergoing testing at multiple labs, then we have broken the Clovis sound barrier, if you will,” he said. “If you are looking for the first people in North America, you are going to have to step back more than 1,000 years beyond Clovis to find them."

The UO's Cressman was lured to the area after being told about a woman who was digging in the caves for artifacts and began uncovering large bones, Jenkins said. Cressman, an anthropologist, died in April 1994 after 35 years on the UO faculty.

During the two summers of fieldwork, Jenkins, colleagues and students, working in four of the caves, retrieved manufactured threads of sinew and plant fibers, hide, basketry, cordage, rope, wooden pegs, animal bones, two forms of projectile point fragments and diverse kinds of feces. These items were found "in an unbroken stratigraphic sequence spanning the late Pleistocene and Holocene," the researchers wrote in the study. Some of the thread is narrower than that holding buttons on many shirts today and date back 12,750 years, Jenkins said.

"To find these threads was just incredible," said Jenkins, who directs the Northern Great Basin Archaeological Field School. "We found a little pit in the bottom of a cave. It was full of camel, horse and mountain sheep bones, and in there we found a human coprolite. We radiocarbon-dated the camel and mountain sheep bones, as well as the coprolite, to 14,300 years ago."

With radiocarbon dating adjusted to calendar years, the materials date back to about 14,400 years ago, he added. Such a dating puts the Oregon site into about the same time period as Chile's Monte Verde site.

The UO’s Cressman reported his discoveries in 1940, but his conclusions on material he found were not widely accepted because of a lack of solid documentation. “Cressman was correct about the association of human cultural remains with Pleistocene animals such as the now extinct camels, horses, and bison that once ranged the plain in front of the Paisley Caves, but it has taken nearly 70 years and the development and application of new scientific methods to prove it,” Jenkins said.

“Had the human coprolites at the Paisley Caves not been analyzed for DNA and subjected to rigorous dating methodology,” he added, "the pre-Clovis age of the artifacts recovered with the megafaunal remains could not have been conclusively proven. In other words, the pre-Clovis-aged component of this site could very well have been missed or dismissed by archaeologists.”